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The Orthodox Church and the schism
robert o. crummey
The seventeenth century was a time of bitter conflict and wrenching change
in the Orthodox Church of Russia and its relationship with the tsars’ govern-
ment and society. In this respect, the Church reflected the fissures in Muscovite
society and culture of which it was an integral part. After the successful build-
ing of a ‘national’ Church in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, described
in an earlier chapter, its leaders faced grave challenges. Critics from within
demanded liturgical purity and moral reform and representatives of other
branches of Eastern Orthodoxy challenged the legitimacy of Russian national
tradition. At critical moments – especially in the pivotal years, 1649–67 – the
clashing interests of the tsars’ government and Church’s leaders disrupted
the ‘symphony’ that, in Orthodox tradition, ideally characterises the relations
of Church and state. And laymen and women increasingly rebelled against
the Church’s claims and its economic power and social privilege. By the first
decades of the eighteenth century, the results of these conflicts included a
radical redefinition of the relationship between Church and state and a schism
among the faithful.
The legacy of the past
Several of the most important themes in the history of the Russian Church
after 1613 can be traced to pivotal events at the end of the sixteenth century
and beginning of the seventeenth. First, in 1589, while visiting the Russian
capital in search of financial support, Patriarch Jeremiah of Constantinople
agreed, under extreme pressure, to the creation of the Patriarchate of Moscow
and, in 1590 and 1593, the other Orthodox patriarchs accepted the fait accompli.
This act both culminated and symbolised the changing relationship between
the Greek and Russian branches of Orthodoxy. Even after 1589, the Greeks
who came to Moscow for alms remained convinced that the Greek ‘mother
Church’ was still the ultimate arbiter of Eastern Orthodox belief and practice.
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For their part, the leaders of the Muscovite government and Church were
acutely aware of the fact that, after the fall of Byzantium in 1453, the tsardom
was the only major Orthodox state left on earth and thus primary guardian of
true Christianity.
Second, in the late sixteenth century, the Orthodox Church in the Polish-
Lithuanian Commonwealth faced many threats. The Roman Catholic hier-
archy and missionary orders, in alliance with the government of Sigismund
III, worked energetically to convert Orthodox believers as did various Protes-
tant groups. The Orthodox response took two forms. Lay leaders established
centres of Orthodox scholarship and publishing and founded schools. The
Ostrih Bible of 1581, the first published translation of the Old and New Testa-
ments into Church Slavonic, is the best-known result of these early initiatives.
In 1596, however, all but two members of the Orthodox hierarchy of the
Commonwealth accepted the Union of Brest under which they recognised the
supremacy of the Pope in return for the right to retain the Orthodox liturgy
in Slavonic.
From the outset, many Orthodox believers, particularly the leaders of the
laity, rejected the union. A network of confraternities spread to all the main
urban centres in the Orthodox regions of the Commonwealth and every-
where founded schools modelled on the best pedagogical practices of Roman
Catholic Europe. By 1633, moreover, the revitalised Orthodox hierarchy had
won legal recognition from the crown. In short, the Orthodox Church in
Ukraine successfully rebuilt itself as an institution and developed networks
of schools and scholars fit to defend Eastern Orthodoxy against its enemies,
especially post-Tridentine Roman Catholicism. For the rest of the century,
the Orthodox Church in Muscovite Russia had the opportunity to draw upon
these experiences and cultural resources.
Third and last, the experience of the Time of Troubles (1598–1613) shaped
the later history of the Muscovite Church in two important ways. First,
Russia’s sufferings undermined the conviction that, as the last Orthodox realm
on earth, Muscovy enjoyed God’s special blessing. Again and again, contem-
poraries asked why God had allowed His people to suffer such devastation.
Second, the Troubles emphasised the potential role of the Russian patriarch as
leader in revitalising the community. However accurately, tradition holds that
Patriarch Hermogen (Germogen) (1606–12) sent out pastoral appeals urging
Russians to hold fast to the native tradition of Orthodoxy, reject all com-
promise with foreigners and their ways, and give their lives to restore the
tsardom. Hermogen’s three most powerful seventeenth-century successors –
Filaret (1619–34), Nikon (1652–8 or 1666) and Ioakim (1674–90) – all followed his
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lead, attempting to use their office to impose their convictions and agendas
on the Church.
Patriarch Filaret
The election in 1613 of Michael Romanov, teenage scion of a powerful boyar
clan related by marriage to the old Riurikid dynasty, traditionally marks the
end of the Time of Troubles. The new tsar’s father, Filaret, would have been
a far stronger candidate for the throne but for the fact that in 1600 he had
been tonsured against his will on Boris Godunov’s orders – vows that were
irrevocable by Eastern Orthodox tradition even though made under duress.
Thereafter, although by origin a lay politician and courtier, he could hold
only ecclesiastical office. Filaret’s career as a prince of the Church was both
meteoric and confusing: the First False Dmitrii appointed him Metropolitan
of Rostov, and both Vasilii Shuiskii and the Second Pretender recognised him
as patriarch, at least temporarily.
In 1619, on his return to Moscow, Filaret ascended the vacant patriarchal
throne and, in practice, also acted as effective head of his son’s government.
Historians have usually characterised him as a forceful, but unimaginative
conservative and, after years of imprisonment in Poland, a staunch defender
of Muscovite Orthodoxy against Roman Catholic influence.
Filaret strove to strengthen the Church in three ways. First, beginning with
his consecration by Patriarch Theophanes of Jerusalem, he systematically built
up the power and prestige of the Moscow Patriarchate. He adopted the title
Velikii Gosudar’ (Great Sovereign), normally applied only to tsars, and, on many
occasions, used it in decrees issued jointly with his son. In light of Filaret’s
position as head of the ruling family, this practice made sense, but set a dan-
gerous precedent. He also took practical steps to make the patriarch the most
powerful and richest man in Muscovy other than the tsar himself. Through
royal grants, he built up an impressive portfolio of estates in all parts of Rus-
sia from which he collected revenue and in which he had judicial authority
over all but the most serious crimes. To administer these territories and col-
lect revenue from the clergy, Filaret created separate patriarchal chancelleries
for administration, finances and judicial affairs, parallel to the offices of the
state bureaucracy, and a corps of servitors – laymen as well as clergy – to
manage them and also to serve as his retinue. In short, as patriarch, he virtu-
ally made himself ruler of a separate principality within the realm, a precedent
that the more ambitious of his successors eagerly followed.
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The Orthodox Church and the schism
Second, he adopted practical and symbolic measures to preserve the purity
of Muscovite Orthodoxy. Rebuking his immediate predecessor, Metropolitan
Iona of Krutitsy, locum tenens in his absence, he insisted, for example, that only
Orthodox baptism by triple immersion was valid and therefore that all for-
eigners – even Eastern Orthodox believers from the Polish Commonwealth –
had to be baptised again in order to be received into the Russian Church.
In 1620, a Church Council in Moscow adopted his policy. The driving force
behind this exceptionally rigorous stance was probably fear of the corrupt-
ing influence of the Uniate movement in the Commonwealth: the anti-Union
Orthodox in Ukraine took the same position.
Although Filaret saw Roman Catholicism as Orthodoxy’s most danger-
ous foe, he also tried to shelter his flock from the pernicious influence of
freethinkers and Protestants. As is well known, he had two intellectuals
from prominent aristocratic families, S. I. Shakhovskoi and I. A. Khvoros-
tinin, imprisoned temporarily in monasteries for disrespect to Orthodoxy or
immoral conduct. As for Protestants, many of whom had come to Moscow
as mercenary soldiers, he ordered them in 1633 to live exclusively in their
own settlement–aforeign, non-Orthodox enclave within the city, later nick-
named ‘The German Quarter’ (nemetskaia sloboda). Military exigencies, how-
ever, ruled out any additional limitations ontheirfreedomtoworkand worship
in Moscow.
1
Third, the ‘Gutenberg revolution’ belatedly took root in Muscovite Russia
at the beginning of the seventeenth century. Printing presented the Church
with both an opportunity and a challenge. Well aware of the dangers of open
public discussion in print, tsars and patriarchs maintained a virtual monopoly
over this revolutionary technology: the official Printing Office (Pechatnyi dvor)
published the overwhelming majority of books that appeared in Russia during
the seventeenth century. Printing made it possible to provide parishes and
monasteries with reliablecopies of the service books that the Orthodoxliturgy
requires. Evenso,therewereperils,forpublishinguniformeditions of liturgical
books requires the editors to establish authoritative texts. Given centuries of
evolving liturgical practice within the Orthodox Commonwealth, leading to
different practices in different communities, and the inevitable variations in
1 Metropolitan Makarii, Istoriia russkoi tserkvi, 12 vols. (D
¨
usseldorf: Br
¨
ucken-Verlag, 1968–
9), vol. xi,pp.3–8, 23–33;A.V.Kartashev,Ocherki po istorii russkoi tserkvi, 2 vols. (Moscow:
Nauka, 1991), vol. ii,pp.96–9; Pierre Pascal, Avvakum et les d
´
ebuts du raskol, 2nd edn (Paris,
The Hague: Mouton, 1969), pp. 25–7; Serge A. Zenkovsky, Russkoe staroobriadchestvo;
dukhovnye dvizheniia semnadtsatogo veka (Forum Slavicum, Bd. 21) (Munich: W. Fink, 1970),
pp. 70–4; Paul Bushkovitch, Religion and Society in Russia: The Sixteenth and Seventeenth
Centuries (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 52–3.
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hand-copied manuscripts, how were editors to decide which variant was truly
Orthodox?
As soon as he returned to Moscow, Filaret faced a crisis over this issue. In his
absence, Tsar Michael had turned to the leaders of the Holy Trinity monastery,
the only important centre of learning in a devastated cultural landscape, and
commissioned Abbot Dionysii to prepare new editions of fundamental litur-
gical texts beginning with the Sluzhebnik (Missal). He and his collaborators,
Arsenii Glukhoi and Ivan Nasedka, compared recent Muscovite editions with
a selection of earlier Slavonic and Greek texts and found a number of passages
that, in their eyes, were illogical or tinged with heresy. Their work elicited
a violent reaction. In 1618, led by Metropolitan Iona, an ecclesiastical council
attacked their editions, particularly for small changes in the ceremony of bless-
ing the waters at Epiphany, condemned Dionysii and the others as heretics
and defrocked them.
Filaret immediately made clear that the Printing House would continue
to publish new editions of the liturgical books prepared by the best native
scholars. Accordingly, at the urging of Patriarch Theophanes, he pardoned the
disgraced editors and sent them back to work. At the same time, he remained
vigilant for signs of heresy, particularly Latin influence. He refused to publish
the catechism of the Ruthenian monk, Lavrentii Zyzanii; condemned the
Evangelie uchitel’noe (Gospels with commentary) of another Ruthenian, Kyryl
Tranquillon Stavrovetsky; and attempted to prohibit the importation of all
books from the Polish Commonwealth. The patriarch’s caution meant that
the Pechatnyi dvor published a very modest number of books in his lifetime.
But, by setting the programme in motion and assembling the scholars, he
laid the groundwork for the flowering of ecclesiastical publishing under his
unimposing successors, Ioasaf I (1634–40) and Iosif (1642–52).
2
The Church in the seventeenth century
At this point, let us pause for a very brief survey of the institutional struc-
ture and economic position of the Russian Orthodox Church in the seven-
teenth century. This is no easy task: historians have given remarkably little
systematic attention to these subjects. We can therefore present only general
impressions, supported by fragmentary or anecdotal information. One thing
is clear, however. Like the secular administration, the seventeenth-century
2 Pascal, Avvakum,pp.8–14, 21–4; Zenkovsky, Russkoe staroobriadchestvo,pp.91–6; Kartashev,
Ocherki, vol. ii,pp.85–94.
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Church appeared to be an imposing institutional structure, but, in practice,
the patriarch and the metropolitans, archbishops and bishops who served
under him had very little effective control over monastic communities or the
parish clergy and their flocks to say nothing of the many self-appointed priests,
monks and nuns who reported to no human authority. The crises that shook
the seventeenth-century Church arose, in considerable measure, from the
attempts of the hierarchy to exercise more effective control over the body of
Christ.
3
The enormous size of Russian eparchies (dioceses) – compared, for exam-
ple, with those of the Greek Church – is one obvious reason why the hierarchy
had so little impact on the day-to-day life of its flock. The leaders of the Church
had long recognised the problem, but, over the course of the seventeenth cen-
tury, Church Councils consistently resisted proposals to create new dioceses by
subdividing existing jurisdictions, presumably because bishops feared the loss
of revenue and power that reform would inevitably entail. In 1619, for exam-
ple, the Russian hierarchy consisted of Patriarch Filaret, four metropolitans,
six archbishops and one bishop.
4
Obvious pastoral needs, created by the ter-
ritorial expansion of the Russian state and the challenge of religious dissent,
however, led to the creation of some new jurisdictions, Tobol’sk in Siberia
(1620), Viatka (1656), Belgorod (1667), Nizhnii Novgorod (1672) and four in
1682 – Ustiug Velikii, Kholmogory, Voronezh and Tambov. By 1700, the size of
the hierarchy had risen to twenty-four – the patriarch, fourteen metropolitans,
seven archbishops and two bishops.
By and large, seventeenth-century parish priests, like their predecessors,
lived far from their bishops both geographically and socially. Anecdotal evi-
dence indicates that the parish priesthood was usually an ascribed occupation,
handed down from father to son with the approval of the local community. At
best, its members’ education consisted of the customary instruction in read-
ing and writing, using familiar religious texts, and hands-on training in the
liturgy. The parish clergy were intimately interconnected with local society.
As a married man – unlike his celibate bishop – a priest had to provide for
his family through farming and collecting the customary fees for his services.
He was vulnerable to pressure from officials of the crown, at the mercy of
the nobles who owned land nearby, and could easily become the enemy of
3 Acentral theme inGeorgB. Michels,AtWarwith theChurch.ReligiousDissentin Seventeenth-
Century Russia (Stanford,Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1999).
4 P. M. Stroev, Spiski ierarkhov i nastoiatelei monastyrei rossiiskoi tserkvi (St Petersburg:
Tipografiia V. S. Balasheva, 1877).
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his parishioners if he attempted to challenge the syncretism of Christian and
traditional folk beliefs and practices that shaped their lives.
Inthe second halfof the century, however, theseconditions began to change.
Patriarchs and bishops began to insist that all candidates for priestly office be
literate and receive formal ordination charters from them. Moreover, having
installed new priests, the hierarchy attempted to make sure that they followed
the official policies of the Church.
5
The success of these initiatives naturally
varied widely from place to place depending on the energy of the bishop and
the responsiveness or resistance of the parish priests involved. In addition,
as Daniel Kaiser’s studies show, diocesan courts conscientiously investigated
alleged breaches of canon law on marriage, the family and sexual mores and,
in most cases, strictly upheld the Church’s traditional teachings.
6
In the seventeenth century, monasteries remained a vital force in Russian
Orthodoxy: at the same time, the emergence of competing centres of author-
ity, especially the patriarchate, probably reduced their relative power within
the Church as compared with earlier centuries. Monasteries such as the Holy
Trinity, the Kirillo-Belozerskii and the Solovetskii were still very wealthy and
influential, each one a complex hierarchical organisation of monks and lay
dependents that functioned largely independently of outside control. Foun-
dations like these stood out as exceptional, however: the vast majority of the
494 men’s and women’s communities which owned populated land in 1653
were very small.
7
All, large and small, depended heavily on the patronage of
laymen and women of all stations, from the imperial family to peasants and
townspeople.
In the seventeenth century, monastic estates continued to grow in spite of
repeatedlegal prohibitions on newacquisitions of land. The pace of acquisition
through bequests, however, slowed to a trickle after mid-century.
8
In addition,
all members of the hierarchy, above all the patriarch, likewise controlled exten-
sive tracts and the revenues they produced.
9
A summary of the landholdings
of the hierarchy, the monasteries and the lay elite in 1678 provides a rough
5 Michels, War,pp.31–2, 163–70, 187.
6 Mostrecently, Daniel H. Kaiser, ‘ “WhoseWife WillShe Be at theResurrection?”Marriage
and Remarriage in Early Modern Russia’, SR 62 (2003): 302–23.
7 Ia. E. Vodarskii, ‘Tserkovnye organizatsii i ikh krepostnye krest’iane vo vtoroi polovine
XVII – nachale XVIII v.’, in Istoricheskaia geografiia Rossii. XII – nachalo XX v. (Moscow:
Nauka, 1975), p. 76.
8 S. V. Nikolaeva, ‘Vklady i vkladchiki v Troitse-Sergiev Monastyr’ v XVI–XVII vekakh.
(Po vkladnym knigam XVII veka)’, in Tserkov’ v istorii Rossii, 3 vols. (Moscow: Institut
rossiiskoi istorii Rossiiskoi akademii nauk, 1997–9), vol. ii (1998), pp. 81–107.
9 Vodarskii, ‘Tserkovnye organizatsii’; Iu. V. Got’e, Zamoskovnyi krai v XVII veke (Moscow:
Gosudarstvennoe sotsial’no-ekonomicheskoe izdatel’stvo, 1937), pp. 230–53.
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indication of the relative wealth of the leaders of the Church. At that time, the
patriarch owned lands with 7,128 peasant households, the six metropolitans a
total of 7,167 – of which the Metropolitan of Rostov owned 3,909 – and six arch-
bishops a total of 4,494. Monasteries and churches owned lands with almost
100,000 peasant households, led by the Holy Trinity with close to 17,000.Tobe
sure, the overwhelming majority of monasteries on the list had fewer than 200
households. By comparison, the members of the boyar council, the tsar’s most
prominent officials and courtiers, controlled a total of 46,771 households. The
richest layman on the list, I. M. Vorotynskii, owned 4,609. Thus the data from
1678, however flawed they may be, show the great wealth, in laymen’s terms,
of the hierarchy and the largest monasteries. No wonder the provincial gentry
and townspeople considered them ‘strong people’ against whose power and
privileges they complained so bitterly in the 1630s and 1640s!
Liturgy and public ceremony also brought the leaders of the Church and
the secular elite together. In the most dramatic example, tsar and patriarch
acted out the ‘symphony’ of Church and state in the public rituals of Epiphany
and Palm Sunday, commemorating Christ’s baptism and entry into Jerusalem.
These ceremonies, created by sixteenth-century Muscovite churchmen from
the repertoire of ecumenical Christian symbolism, underwent some alter-
ations in detail and emphasis during the seventeenth century. Their central
message did not change. Moscow, capital of the only powerful Eastern Ortho-
dox monarchy, was the centre of the Christian world and its ruler, consecrated
and supported by the Church, justified his authority by defending the true
faith. The ceremonies’ symbolic complexity, however, left the issue of the rel-
ative importance of tsar and patriarch in the economy of salvation open to
differing interpretations.
10
These great festivals formed only a small part of the ritual tapestry that
shaped the life of the hierarchy and the imperial court. As OrthodoxChristians,
the tsars and their families and attendants took part in all the main services of
the liturgical calendar, celebrating the most solemn feasts such as Easter in the
cathedrals of the Moscow Kremlin with full magnificence. And the imperial
10 Robert O. Crummey, ‘Court Spectacles in Seventeenth Century Russia: Illusion and
Reality’, in Daniel Clarke Waugh (ed.), Essays in Honor of A. A. Zimin (Columbus, Oh.:
Slavica, 1985), pp. 130–58;MichaelS.Flier, ‘BreakingtheCode: TheImageoftheTsarinthe
Muscovite Palm Sunday Ritual’, in Michael S. Flier and Daniel Rowland (eds.), Medieval
Russian Culture, vol. ii (California Slavic Studies, 19) (Berkeley: University of California
Press,1994), pp. 213–42; Michael S. Flier, ‘Court Ceremonyin an Age of Reform. Patriarch
Nikon and the Palm Sunday Ritual’, in Samuel H. Baron and Nancy Shields Kollmann
(eds.), Religion and Culture in Early Modern Russia and Ukraine (DeKalb, Ill.: Northern
Illinois University Press, 1997), pp. 74–95; Paul Bushkovitch, ‘The Epiphany Ceremony
of the Russian Court in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries’, RR 49 (1990): 1–18.
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family continued the tradition of regular pilgrimages to the Holy Trinity and
other monasteries to venerate their saintly founders.
11
Pressure for reform
After the relatively uneventful tenure of Patriarch Filaret, the Muscovite
Church began to feel pressure for change from within and from without.
Like their counterparts in Roman Catholic and Protestant Europe, would-be
reformers among the clergy strove for consistency and good order in the cel-
ebration of the liturgy and attempted to raise the moral tone of parish life.
Many of their complaints were not new. In 1636, for example, Ivan Neronov
and other parish priests in Nizhnii Novgorod sent a petition to Patriarch Ioasaf,
asking for his support in restoring order and dignity to services of worship. The
petitioners recited a litany of long-standing abuses – mnogoglasie (the practice
of chanting up to ‘five or six’ different parts of the service simultaneously)
and other liturgical short-cuts. They also complained at length about rowdy
behaviour during services.
12
In a series of pastoral instructions, Patriarch Ioasaf
strongly supported their demands for pious behaviour during the liturgy. Ten
years later, his successor, Iosif, issued a general decree that all priests, deacons
and ‘all Orthodox Christians fast . . . and refrain from drunkenness, injustice
and all kinds of sin’. Worshippers ‘should stand in God’s church with fear and
trembling . . . silently . . .’ and pray ‘over their sins with tears, humble sighs
and contrite hearts...’
The Nizhnii Novgorod petitioners also attacked the laity’s boisterous
celebration of non- or pre-Christian festivals such as Rusalii and Koliada at
the most solemn times of the liturgical year. Folk minstrels (skomorokhi)drew
their particular ire (for depictions of skomorokhi and other popular entertain-
ers, see Plate 23). On this issue too, the hierarchy agreed but could see no way
to uproot these ancient practices.
13
Attacking mnogoglasie was more controversial. Liturgical short-cuts had
crept into Russian Orthodoxy for good reason. Over the centuries, monastic
services had become the norm in parishes, putting severe demands on the
11 I. Zabelin, Domashnii byt russkikh tsarei v XVI i XVII st. (Moscow: Tipografiia A. I. Mamon-
tova, 1895), pp. 376–435; Nancy Shields Kollmann, ‘Pilgrimage, Procession, and Symbolic
Space in Sixteenth-Century Russian Politics’, in Flier and Rowland (eds.), Medieval Rus-
sian Culture, vol. ii,pp.163–81.
12 N. V. Rozhdestvenskii, ‘K istorii bor’by s tserkovnymi bezporiadkami, otgoloskami iazy-
chestva i porokami v russkom bytu XVII v.’, ChOIDR 201 (1902,kn.2), pp. 19–23.
13 AAE, 4 vols. (St. Petersburg: Tipografiia II Otdeleniia Sobstvennoi E. I. V. Kantseliarii,
1836), vol. iv,pp.481–2 (no. 321).
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The Orthodox Church and the schism
patience and stamina of even the most devout laypeople.
14
When the first
attempts to set some limits to these traditional practices encountered vig-
orous opposition, Iosif retreated and, in 1649, to the reformers’ chagrin, an
ecclesiastical council chose to maintain the status quo.
15
Paradoxically, the reformers’ desire for an orderly and consistent liturgy
opened the Muscovite Church to books and scholars from Ukraine – precisely
what Filaret had feared. From the late 1630s to the early 1650s, the Pechatnyi
dvor published new editions of the most important service books, a number
of saints’ lives and classics of Eastern Christian spirituality such as writings
of St John Chrysostom, St Efrem the Syrian and St John Climacus, works
in which the editors avoided offending Muscovite sensibilities. In the 1640s,
however, the Pechatnyi dvor also published a number of works from Ukraine
including Petr Mohyla’s catechism, the Nomokanon of Zakhariia Kopystenskii
and the pioneering Slavonic grammar of Meletii Smotritskii. Moreover, since
the Printing Office desperately needed more editors who knew Greek and
Latin, three scholars from Ukraine joined its staff in 1649. Finally, from Ukraine
came a book that stimulated apocalyptic reflection among the cultural elite of
Moscow, Hegumen Nafanail’s compilation of apocalyptic writings, the Book
of Faith, an Orthodox interpretation of the Union of Brest as a prelude to the
End Time. The Muscovite miscellany, the Kirillova kniga, and the writings of
St Efrem also contributed to the climate of apocalyptic speculation.
16
In 1645, Aleksei (Alexis) Mikhailovich became tsar. His decisive role in the
stormy events of the following decades demonstrates the extent to which,
long before Peter I, the attitudes and choices of the secular ruler ultimately
determined the fate of the Russian Orthodox Church. Strong supporters of
reform, the young ruler and his confessor, Stefan Vonifat’ev, gathered like-
minded men, traditionally known as the Zealots of Piety, including parish
priests such as Neronov and his prot
´
eg
´
e Avvakum, and in time the future
patriarch Nikon. Everyone in this diverse group agreed that parish life must
be revitalised through effective preaching, the full and orderly celebration of
the liturgy, and strict enforcement of the Church’s moral teachings.
Before long, Alexis and his allies in the Church made several of the reform-
ers’ demands official policy. The tsar, already known for his personal antipathy
towards folk entertainment, issued a series of decrees, beginning in December
14 Pascal, Avvakum,pp.58–9.
15 ‘Deianiia Moskovskogo tserkovnogo sobora 1649 goda’, ed. S. A. Belokurov, ChOIDR
171 (1894,kn.4): 1–52.
16 A. S. Zernova, Knigi kirillovskoi pechati izdannye v Moskve v XVI–XVII vekakh (Moscow:
Gosudarstvennaia Ordena Lenina biblioteka SSSR imeni V. I. Lenina, 1958), pp. 46–77;
Pascal, Avvakum,pp.65–71, 128–32; Zenkovsky, Russkoe staroobriadchestvo,pp.91–101.
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